Experimental Protocol Proposal: Testing the Prompt Coherence Engine (PCE)

Thank you for this very interesting perspective. Your approach of directly observing coherence signals in hidden states is quite complementary to what I am trying to explore here. Your observation that high coherence signals can correspond to both productive convergence and unproductive stagnation is particularly relevant. This suggests that coherence alone may indeed require an additional signal (such as entropy or trust) to distinguish beneficial stabilization from pathological locking. In the PCE hypothesis, the expected effect is not simply a higher consistency, but a specific behavioral signature: the ability to maintain reasoning stability under contradictory constraints while exploring alternative hypotheses. Your results on the intervention based on coherence signals are also very interesting. Since the PCE works purely at the level of prompt architecture rather than through inference time interventions, it would be fascinating to see if similar signals appear in hidden states when the axiomatic structure is active. If hidden state measures such as the one you describe were applied to the PCE condition, this could provide an additional layer of analysis beyond the behavioral assessment proposed in the protocol. Thank you again for your sharing.